or at any rate unpleasant...
from the LRB: Iain Sinclair on 'The Raging Peloton'
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Cyclists are reactionary?
(26 posts)-
Posted 13 years ago #
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Some are some aren't.
Think the writer must have had his pram knocked over by a pavement cycler.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Think the writer needs to up his medication! Barely readable, what pretentious tosh.
Posted 13 years ago # -
No paragraphs meant I didn't even consider reading it. I don't feel too hard done by.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I half thought it was one of those spoof articles that they had published by mistake....
Must say the LRB's getting a bad rep in my book. The last thing I read there (in August) prompted me and others to complain to the editor, leading them to pull an on-line piece and publish a long letter of apology.
This is marginally better than that, if appallingly written.............
Posted 13 years ago # -
I'm afraid I didn't get past the first paragraph/sentence (they appeared to be the same thing).
Posted 13 years ago # -
So, to summarise. Creative types living in east London are a royal pain, bikes are somehow both a left-wing and right-wing wheeze and the Barlcays cycle hire scheme is difficult to use at first. Took an awful lot of words for him to says that though.
Posted 13 years ago # -
"Took an awful lot of words for him to says that though"
Yes! (I skimmed)
"Creative types living in east London are a royal pain"
Only in eL??
Think there is some envy buried in the verbiage.
Posted 13 years ago # -
D'you think that "peddled" was a clever funny jokey word-playful deliberatemistakeypun or just incompetence?
I don't think I've ever seen someone misspell 'pedal' as 'peddle' so it puzzles me why the same people can't extrapolate 'pedal' to 'pedalled'.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Wow, well done for ploughing through that lot. If I find myself with a lot of time and a strong desire to plough through half a ton of verbal cholera I'll give it a go.
Posted 13 years ago # -
just incompetence
"I don't think I've ever seen someone misspell 'pedal' as 'peddle' "
I've even seen it on bike related web sites - even one peddling components (really).
Posted 13 years ago # -
Its got to be a spoof piece, at first he complains of being mown down by the 'peloton'(I mean, common) and finishes the piece by saying how much he actually enjoyed cycling around, with his headphones in. He concludes by pointing out just how spineless he is. Gotta be a spoof.
Posted 13 years ago # -
That is a very typical piece by Iain Sinclair. He is the expert on all things to do with the landscape of London. He is a kind of libertarian, non-conformist, counter culture, 1960s type. Regardless of the intended topic - Boris Bike - he will return to his theme of satirising modern life. He has just turned his spotlight on cycling where he as per his usual style he attempts to puncture sacred cows [or what he thinks are sacred cows]. As I skimmed it I found several mentions of Jock McFadyen an artist he likes [if he can possibly exist] who when walking on the canal - which I understand is a dangerous activity as the cyclists have taken it over in classic London dominant fascist way [i.e. behaving just like the mad london drivers]. Old Jock wants to 'punch the b$£@%$£@s into the canal when he hears a ting. Old Jock also says this which I ask you all to ponder on [remember Sinclair is trying to provoke you, he is just verbose and some of his sacred cow puncturing gets obscured by verbiage - also he rarely has data, or uses it to his own ends]
The older, cannier Jock McFadyen agreed: you make your own rules. ‘I never wear a helmet. I ride on the pavement. I never go on the road, except out of frustration. And I always go through red lights, always. And never sound a bell. Traffic lights don’t have the intelligence to say there are no pedestrians. You do have confrontations with drivers. I’ve had to punch people’s mirrors off.’ What Jock admires most about the bicycle is the simplicity of design. ‘You can build a bike from scratch in an hour,’ he said. He owns 45 of them. Most of his crashes, he acknowledges, have been his own fault.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Seething with futile pretensiousness. If I had advertised on that page, I would have requested a refund on the grounds that I was paying to advertise to an audience that understood English.
Posted 13 years ago # -
He seems like right barrel of laughs.
I'm not sure what point he was trying to make, beyond general moaning about all aspects of London society.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Sorry for inflicting that on you all -- as usual, I am most impressed by your erudition and good taste! (I couldn't make head or tail of it)
Posted 13 years ago # -
Sinclair has links to another writer Chris Petit who is less curmudgeonly. They were both obsessed with a 1960s type figure The Falconer [?] who seemed mildly sinister. The London Review of Books had an editor Toby Young who is a Conservative.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I wish more people wrote like Ian Jack.
Posted 13 years ago # -
"Sinclair has links to another writer Chris Petit"
Yes -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Orbital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Petit
'Came to notice' with -
Posted 13 years ago # -
Ian Jack good. Check out this quote from the explorer Benedict Allen in the Guardian Review yesterday [at the start of his review of the book THe Great Explorers by Robin Hanbury-Tenison]
"I daresay that, even in the 21st century, there are explorers who serve a useful function - Pen Hadow comes to mind, leading scientists across the Arctic. But from the point of view of our dear old abused and shrunken planet, they do now seem entirely unnecessary. Worse, they might be a distraction - I'm thinking of the antics of the adventurers you see dumbed down on the telly. No, the type who calls himself an "explorer" today is, when you come to think about it, as likely as not a sort of middle class vainglorious athlete; he's a dilettante, but with communication skills, the fortitude possessed by any half decent soldier, and a flair for self publicity - while the real business of discovery is being done by the boffin scratching at a rock sample or staring into an electron microscope. Yet our public schools still churn them out, these explorer types - I suppose I mean types like me. And for what purpose? We strut and fret, showing ourselves off upon the world stage while that stage burns."
I liked that.
Posted 13 years ago # -
The Raging Peloton
Iain Sinclair suggests that the new urban cyclist is a phenomenon of the last decade but the move from the kind of bicycle culture figured in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may have occurred much earlier (LRB, 20 January). The design historian Reyner Banham argued that in Britain there had been a shift from the proletarian cyclist to a new type of urban middle-class rider, symbolised by the Moulton, a bicycle with small wheels, an innovative design and a progressive cultural image. The Moulton appealed to the socially mobile, according to Banham, partly because of an ingenious technical specification in the form of a polythene ring on the chain wheel, designed to keep clothing free from oil and constituting ‘a minor cultural revolution’, liberating the rider from ‘that badge of social shame: trouser clips’. Banham rode a Moulton himself and considered it to signify his own transition from working-class ‘scholarship boy’ to metropolitan intellectual. For ‘Central London and the West End’, it was the ‘thinking man’s vehicle’.Chris Goldie
Sheffield Hallam UniversityPosted 13 years ago # -
"it was the ‘thinking man’s vehicle’."
What can I say??
Posted 13 years ago # -
"Badge of shame"??? I always thought trouser clips went with sharp suits and Brideshead revisited type casual cool... lol
Posted 13 years ago # -
If I need to keep my trousers out of the chain, I use my sock. What else is it there for?
Posted 13 years ago # -
Even though I generally wear shorts and have no need of trouser-clips I might put one on the next time I travel through somewhere posh just to give them a laugh.
Posted 13 years ago # -
"I use my sock. What else is it there for?"
So -
You only wear one sock?
Posted 13 years ago #
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